Up the Waterspout: How David’s General Joab Got Inside Jerusalem

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If we want to understand how King David captured Jerusalem, at least as the capture is depicted in 2 Samuel 5, we must first understand the meaning of the Hebrew word tsinnor. Geology can tell us what may have happened, as Dan Gill convincingly demonstrates in “How They Met: Geology Solves Long-Standing Mystery of Hezekiah’s Tunnelers.” But only the study of the use of words in context can tell us what the tsinnor was. Unfortunately, tsinnor has long been a crux. In the sidebar “Meanings Assigned to the Word Tsinnor,” we have listed some of the meanings that various Bible translators and scholars over two millennia have assigned to the word. These range all the way from water-shaft to grappling hook to penis.

According to the Bible, the Jebusites taunted David that he would never be able to conquer the city; they said the lame and the blind would repulse him, perhaps meaning that the Israelites could not defeat even the lame and the blind, if they were defending these city walls. David responded by saying that those of his men wishing to attack the city should reach, or perhaps climb, the tsinnor, and they would be able to attack the lame and the blind (2 Samuel 5:6–8). In the parallel account of the attack in 1 Chronicles, we are told that David announced that the first soldier to smite the Jebusites would be made David’s general; Joab accomplished this, presumably by doing something with the tsinnor, and was consequently made commander-in-chief of David’s army (1 Chronicles 11:4–7).

The various translations of tsinnor listed in the box fall into four general categories: (1) words that suggest some kind of water-passage—such as water-shaft, water channel, watercourse, water pipes, sewer and related words like gutter, tunnel, and canal; (2) weapons of attack, perhaps of the walls, including grappling-hook, grappling iron, scaling hook, hook and dagger; (3) part of the defenses of the city, like fortress, battlement and shield; and (4) parts of the body, presumably where the Israelites would attack the Jebusites (perhaps laming them, but not killing them)—like throat, joint, socket, penis and, its decorous equivalent, membrum virile.

The majority of the translations fall into the first category. The suggestions in the other categories are based largely on philological parallels from cognate Semitic languages, particularly Arabic and Aramaic.

To be sure, other uses of the word in the Hebrew Bible would be even more relevant, but that is part of the problem. Tsinnor is not what scholars call a hapax legomenon, a word that appears in the Bible only once, but it comes very close: It is used in the Bible in only one other place, in Psalm 42:8. This forceful psalm is filled with metaphors of water that are used to evoke spiritual realities. The psalmist, despondent and filled with anxiety, longs for the Lord. The psalm begins with a water image. The psalmist’s soul cries out for the Lord like a hart crying for water; the psalmist’s soul is thirsty. In this land of the Jordan and of numerous deeply cut wadis, “Deep calls to deep at the voice of thy waterspouts (tsinnor).” In the verse following the use of tsinnor, the psalmist speaks of breakers (or waves) and billows, both in parallelism to tsinnor. Within the imagery and movement of the psalm, tsinnor evidently has something to do with flowing water. Based on this reading of Psalm 42, it is certainly possible that, in 2 Samuel 5:8, tsinnor refers to a waterway into the city. In Zechariah 4:12, the prophet uses a related word, tsanterot, meaning pipes or tubes. This usage too supports the translation of tsinnor as a conduit for water. Thus the parallel uses found in classical Hebrew would confirm the translation of the term as “water-shaft.”

How significant are the parallels with Arabic and Aramaic? In a more technical article, I have shown 035why the Arabic cognates on which some scholars have relied are speculative. In Aramaic this word (whether spelled in exactly the same way or in related spellings) usually means waterpipe, spout or duct, which are consistent with the use of the term to mean water-shaft. These Aramaic usages are far more appropriate than the alleged Aramaic parallels to support other readings. In short, the evidence from Aramaic supports the translation of tsinnor in 2 Samuel 5:8 as water-shaft.

Recently I discovered an Ugaritic cognate that provides a close parallel, hitherto overlooked. Ugarit is an ancient site on the Syrian coast near the Mediterranean Sea. It is especially famous for the discovery, in the 1930s, of a cache of cuneiform tablets in the Ugaritic language. Ugaritic is similar in structure and vocabulary to Biblical Hebrew, and it has helped improve our understanding of both the Hebrew language and the Biblical text. What is especially noteworthy about these Ugaritic tablets is that they are dated to the 14th century B.C., a relatively early period of Israel’s history. The language of the tablets thus provides an example of usage and a check on historical reconstructions from this period in ancient Palestine.

The word snr (tsinnor) appears four times in the Ugaritic corpus, three times as personal names, which, unless we know their meaning, are not of much help to us. The fourth usage is more helpful, but unfortunately, the last letter has been partially destroyed. Recent scrutiny of the photographs of this particular tablet, plus the fact that there is no known Ugaritic word that begins with the surviving two letters sn and has a letter other than r as the third letter, have confirmed that the reading is probably snr. Thus scholars generally agree as to how the letter should be restored.

The tablet lists members of various trade guilds in the service of the king. Cyrus Gordon of New York University translates the phrase that concerns us here, a phrase that appears to identify the workers’ trades, as “craftsmen of pipes” or “pipemakers.”^a In this he is probably correct. In context, the guild seems related to the construction of houses. The builders of pipes may have been responsible for constructing water-shafts into the city or for diverting water channels to individual houses. This also supports the translation of tsinnor in 2 Samuel 5:8 as a type of water-shaft.

In the light of this Ugaritic word, the proposals from Arabic and Aramaic seem quite remote. Ugaritic philology neither suggests a meaning unknown in Hebrew, nor requires reevaluating the use of tsinnor in Biblical passages. Instead it supports the best-attested sense of tsinnor in Hebrew, namely, as a kind of water-shaft or part of a water system. The Ugaritic usage thus verifies what has been a longstanding, though not perfectly understood, tradition of translation from antiquity. Moreover, the use of the term tsinnor on an Ugaritic tablet reveals that the Canaanites were constructing water-shafts several centuries before David’s assault on the Jebusite fortress at Jerusalem. It is certainly reasonable therefore that there may well have been such a water-shaft in existence in Jebusite Jerusalem.

Yigal Shiloh, who directed the recent excavations in Jerusalem’s City of David, deferred to those philological studies that concluded that tsinnor referred to something other than a water-shaft or channel. But he does not seem to have scrutinized the reasons for the alternative suggestions. He also concluded that the Warren’s Shaft system post-dated David’s capture of the city—contrary to the probabilities opened up by Dan Gill’s geological analysis. It is indeed tragic that Shiloh’s death at so young an age precluded his reconsideration of the question in light of the new geological and philological evidence.

For further details, see Terence Kleven, “The Use of snr in 2 Sam. 5:8: Hebrew Usage and Comparative Philology,” forthcoming in Vetus Testamentum.

If we want to understand how King David captured Jerusalem, at least as the capture is depicted in 2 Samuel 5, we must first understand the meaning of the Hebrew word tsinnor. Geology can tell us what may have happened, as Dan Gill convincingly demonstrates in “How They Met: Geology Solves Long-Standing Mystery of Hezekiah’s Tunnelers.” But only the study of the use of words in context can tell us what the tsinnor was. Unfortunately, tsinnor has long been a crux. In the sidebar “Meanings Assigned to the Word Tsinnor,” we have listed some of the meanings that various […]